Arthur Dies, First Chronicle, Vol. 2, is officially released, on Luna Bisonte!
This is my poetic life's work, one of the few in which I've tried/am trying to articulate, in one form, my entire praxis and world-view (along with The Ecstatic Nerve and a couple unpublished projects). Nearly 200 pages of avant-archaic anti-epic verse.
Buy Here
This is my poetic life's work, one of the few in which I've tried/am trying to articulate, in one form, my entire praxis and world-view (along with The Ecstatic Nerve and a couple unpublished projects). Nearly 200 pages of avant-archaic anti-epic verse.
Buy Here
From Ivan Argüelles' Introduction:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As archaic as any in an era caught between a crumbling Roman Empire and an as yet undefined future Middle Kingdom, in an outlying and ghostly province where myth and language distort into a syntax forged from a linguistic spoon heated by metaphysics and madness, ARTHUR DIES takes root in the deracinated mind of a chronicler not at home in any temporal scheme and who remains uninhibited by orthographies and grammar rules. Moons away from the modern, Olchar E. Lindsann's projected verse history of the legendary King Arthur takes the reader into realms haunted by lost books and languages in formation. Lopped off words, abstractions and musings about mostly death and transformation, the text as it unravels in its its varying and diverse interpolations and asides becomes a music at times of unbearable beauty and imagination.
Luna Bisonte Prods has now published the first 2 volumes of ARTHUR DIES :First chronicle, heirs of Constantine, vol. 1 published in 2015 and now vol. 2 in 2017. This work in progress with its linguistic inventiveness may be like nothing written since Finnegans Wake! Its obvious antecedent is Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the outstanding prose work of Middle English, and its French originals. Other sources include Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and of course William Blake. But it delves deeper than that, as if into some rusted Jungian unconscious, dredging to light deformed or mangled linguistic and mythic artifacts, barely pronounceable in the dreamer's ear.
[ . . . ]
Indeed as one proceeds through this marvelous text familiar characters, such as Merlin or Vivienne, are encountered beyond the reach of common language, in a world of divinations and sepulchers, in domains where chaotic punctuation and syntactic disorder abound. This is in fact an epic both in the traditional sense of the word, and in the approach of an anti-poetics perspective of what can be undone in that tradition. In its sweeping texts and and contexts it embodies not only the imagined or fictive culture of the twilight era alluded to, but those of our own post-modern and failed civilization with all its cultural and literary -isms that have arisen from an original "avant-garde". Lindsann combines the mythical Avalon with Blake's Albion, pursuing these emblematic nomenclatures to their illogical fusion in an always enigmatic concatenation of events and personages flung about in a supreme and deft literary whirl.
The style and techniques of this epic are at the same its essence: the nonchalant and often ambiguous halts and starts, incomplete sentences, apparently erratic capitalizations, stuttering repetitions, long blocks of prose (as in v. 2) , hand-drawn diagrams (in v. 2), misspellings and deliberately archaic language going back to Middle English or Anglo-Saxon, which of course lend an authenticity to the poem.
[ . . . ]
It is important to note that vol. 1 and 2 differ in stylistic respects quite markedly. Vol. 1 appears more traditionally lyrical, for all its deviant and highly experimental aspects, in both its sensibilities and format, while vol. 2 has a more rugged archaic epic feel, more like the Iliad in its martial paeans and choruses. Vol. 2 contains long monolithic prose chronicle sections that give it an aspect of historicity, and which often bring us up to date with references to Standing Rock, Putin, Homeland Security, etc.
[ . . . ]
This work, of which these are only the first two installments (Arthur is yet to be born, let alone die), is one of sheer, mad genius, alternately enervating and exhilarating, with few if any parallels in contemporary literature. One can question whether this is really poetry or merely the end of literature itself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As archaic as any in an era caught between a crumbling Roman Empire and an as yet undefined future Middle Kingdom, in an outlying and ghostly province where myth and language distort into a syntax forged from a linguistic spoon heated by metaphysics and madness, ARTHUR DIES takes root in the deracinated mind of a chronicler not at home in any temporal scheme and who remains uninhibited by orthographies and grammar rules. Moons away from the modern, Olchar E. Lindsann's projected verse history of the legendary King Arthur takes the reader into realms haunted by lost books and languages in formation. Lopped off words, abstractions and musings about mostly death and transformation, the text as it unravels in its its varying and diverse interpolations and asides becomes a music at times of unbearable beauty and imagination.
Luna Bisonte Prods has now published the first 2 volumes of ARTHUR DIES :First chronicle, heirs of Constantine, vol. 1 published in 2015 and now vol. 2 in 2017. This work in progress with its linguistic inventiveness may be like nothing written since Finnegans Wake! Its obvious antecedent is Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the outstanding prose work of Middle English, and its French originals. Other sources include Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and of course William Blake. But it delves deeper than that, as if into some rusted Jungian unconscious, dredging to light deformed or mangled linguistic and mythic artifacts, barely pronounceable in the dreamer's ear.
[ . . . ]
Indeed as one proceeds through this marvelous text familiar characters, such as Merlin or Vivienne, are encountered beyond the reach of common language, in a world of divinations and sepulchers, in domains where chaotic punctuation and syntactic disorder abound. This is in fact an epic both in the traditional sense of the word, and in the approach of an anti-poetics perspective of what can be undone in that tradition. In its sweeping texts and and contexts it embodies not only the imagined or fictive culture of the twilight era alluded to, but those of our own post-modern and failed civilization with all its cultural and literary -isms that have arisen from an original "avant-garde". Lindsann combines the mythical Avalon with Blake's Albion, pursuing these emblematic nomenclatures to their illogical fusion in an always enigmatic concatenation of events and personages flung about in a supreme and deft literary whirl.
The style and techniques of this epic are at the same its essence: the nonchalant and often ambiguous halts and starts, incomplete sentences, apparently erratic capitalizations, stuttering repetitions, long blocks of prose (as in v. 2) , hand-drawn diagrams (in v. 2), misspellings and deliberately archaic language going back to Middle English or Anglo-Saxon, which of course lend an authenticity to the poem.
[ . . . ]
It is important to note that vol. 1 and 2 differ in stylistic respects quite markedly. Vol. 1 appears more traditionally lyrical, for all its deviant and highly experimental aspects, in both its sensibilities and format, while vol. 2 has a more rugged archaic epic feel, more like the Iliad in its martial paeans and choruses. Vol. 2 contains long monolithic prose chronicle sections that give it an aspect of historicity, and which often bring us up to date with references to Standing Rock, Putin, Homeland Security, etc.
[ . . . ]
This work, of which these are only the first two installments (Arthur is yet to be born, let alone die), is one of sheer, mad genius, alternately enervating and exhilarating, with few if any parallels in contemporary literature. One can question whether this is really poetry or merely the end of literature itself.
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